SEMINAR - Vic Camp

Dr. Vic Camp received his Phd at Washington State University. He Worked for the USGS, followed by 10 years overseas as an Assistant Professor in West Africa (Univesity of Ibadan) and as a field geologist in Iran and Saudi Arabia. Became an Adjunct Professor at SDSU in 1988, and a full-time lecturer at SDSU in 1993. Vic's research interests have largely centered around the tectonomagmatic evolution of continental volcanic provinces. These include ocean closure generating a Mesozoic continental suture zone in the Neo-Tethyan belt of eastern Iran, terrane accretion in the early Proterozoic mobile belts of the Arabian Shield, mantle upwelling in the Cenozoic harrat volcanic province of western Saudi Arabia, and most recently, plume emplacement in the Columbia River Basalt province and the northern Basin and Range.

Vic will lecture on "A Plume-induced Delamination Model for the Enigmatic Grande Ronde Basalts" Wednesday the 21st of February 2007

Abstract

Many workers attribute the great volume and chemical diversity of continental flood basalts to the rapid rise and melting of deep-seated mantle plumes, whereas others suggest that a plume is not necessary, and prefer a model of rapid melting associated with the delamination of mantle and lower crust. These competing models, however, are not mutually exclusive. Here, I will describe the Columbia River flood basalts as a case study, demonstrating that the tectonic history and chemical progression of the lava sequence are consistent with plume-induced delamination of thin Phanerozoic lithosphere juxtaposed against a thick Precambrian cratonic boundary. Such a model may provide a new, realistic mechanism for generating the chemical diversity and high magma supply rates of continental flood basalts in similar tectonic settings.

SEMINAR - Dogan Seber

Dogan Seber is Director of the DAKS Geoinformatics Lab at the as the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Seber is also serving as project manager on the NSF large Information Technology Research project, GEON, for Geosciences Network, for which SDSC is coordinating IT research. Seber received his undergraduate degree in geophysics from the Istanbul Technical University in his native Turkey, and his Ph.D. in seismology and geophysics from Cornell. Seber came to SDSC in 2003 from Cornell University, where he established and directed the Earth Science Information Systems Program in the Institute for the Study of the Continents, a project to develop a comprehensive geological and geophysical digital database system primarily for the Middle East, North Africa, and the United States. One of the largest programs of its kind in the nation, the interactive Web-based system (http://atlas.geo.cornell.edu/) serves hundreds of users daily ranging from geoscientists to elementary school students. Seber and other "early adopters" of geoinformatics in the GEON collaboration have a vision of a geosciences cyberinfrastructure that will help scientists solve earth science problems faster and on a larger scale, ultimately enabling them to encompass the entire Earth system. source: SDSC

Dogan will lecture on the "Enabling Discoveries in the Earth Sciences Through the Geosciences Network (GEON)"; Wednesday the 14th of February 2007

Abstract
Taking advantage of the state-of-the-art information technology resources GEON is building a cyberinfrastructure to enable data sharing, semantic data integration, high-end computations and 4D visualization in easy-to-use web-based environments. The GEON Network currently allows users to search and register Earth science resources such as data sets, software applications and ontologies. Portal based access mechanisms enable developers to built dynamic user interfaces to conduct advanced processing and modeling efforts across distributed computers and supercomputers. Researchers and educators can access the networked resources through the GEON portal to conduct better and more comprehensive science and educational studies. For example, the SYNSEIS portlet in GEON enables users to access in near-real time seismic waveforms from the IRIS Data Management Center, easily build a 3D geologic model within the area of the seismic station(s) and the epicenter and perform a 3D synthetic seismogram analysis to understand the lithospheric structure and earthquake source parameters for any given earthquake in the US. Similarly, GEON's workbench area enables users to create their own work environment and copy, visualize and analyze any data sets within the network, and create subsets of the data sets for their own purposes. Since all these resources are built as part of a Service-oriented Architecture (SOA), they are also used in other development platforms. Developments in the area of semantic integration of the networked datasets continue to advance and prototype studies can be accessed via the GEON portal at www.geongrid.org

SEMINAR - Leonard J. Srnka

Dr. Leonard J. Srnka received a B.S. in Engineering Science from Purdue University in 1968, graduating summa cum laude. In 1974, he received his PhD in Physics from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom and from Corpus Christi College, Oxford University, United Kingdom (1970-1973), where he was a Marshall Scholar. Leonard spent his early career working for the NASA Lunar Science Institute as a Postdoctoral Fellow (1974-1976) and as a Staff Scientist (1976-1979) where he researched on the origins and evolution of lunar and planetary electromagnetism. The latter part of his career has been spent working at the ExxonMobil Corporation. From 1979-1993 he was project leader and supervisor with assignments in electromagnetic methods, seismic modeling and inversion, and borehole geophysics. He was a supervisor for gravity, magnetics, and remote sensing research and applications (1993-1998). From 1998 to present, Len has been the project leader for land and marine electromagnetic technology, and serves as a member of the senior technical staff. He championed the Remote Reservoir Resistivity Mapping (“R3M”) breakthrough research project for upstream applications. He has been the Chief Scientist on numerous marine CSEM surveys offshore Europe and West Africa in 2001-2003. Leonard has special interests in marine MT and CSEM acquisition technology, 3D modeling, data interpretation, and imaging/inversion. He has twenty-six refereed publications and numerous patents issued and pending. source: SEG

Leonard will lecture on the "Illuminating Reservoirs with Electromagnetics"; Wednesday the 7th of February 2007